The Color of Rose Petals
by justbecauseofthis
Summary: ***Spoilers up to CH 70. WARNING: suicidal thoughts (Bury the dead / Do not self-pity / Unburden the heart / I can't . . .) Eren leaves Survey Corps HQ to secretly enter a street fight, which he loses on purpose. This is where the story begins. Alone and heavy with remorse, Eren aimlessly wanders the district, not knowing that he is being followed. [Ereri/Riren]
1. Part One

At this rate, nobody will remember the guy who plugged up the wall in Trost district. Right, Eren?

—Jean, Ch. 70

* * *

 _Bury the dead._

 _Do not self-pity._

 _Unburden the heart._

 _I can't, I can't, I can't . . ._

The taste of brass. White explosions behind the eyes. Sleep floats down upon the world, rippling and boiling above him like the surface of the sea. Eren, flat on his back, doesn't feel the ground beneath him, sinking beneath the undertow of his consciousness. He hovers neither here nor there, swept beneath a tide of oblivion. In this deep quiet place, he wonders if they recognize who he is. This crowd surrounding him, do they know the face of Eren Jaeger? Do they know the name? Do they know he's the one who plugged up the wall?

What would happen if he disappeared?

A gargantuan man, a professional gambler of strength, is bent over Eren, hurling a fist toward his face. Eren's eyes open, and the world swims back into his consciousness. The fist is coming at him, expanding. Blurring closer. A flesh-colored whirl. Eren catches the arm, locking it in place. Amazement overtakes the man's expression. How? he seems to think; his eyes finally latch onto Eren's eyes and _look_ , Who are you? Do I know you?

A chance to retaliate—

Fight, he had once told Mikasa.

Eren slackens his hold. The fist connects with his chin, and his cheek hits the dirt in consequence. The ground spits up dust that channels into his mouth and down his throat. His lungs convulse. His eyelids sag. Blood throbs all around him. He has sunk deep in the ocean where it's very quiet and very still.

Do they know?

There's the ring of a brass bell, hardly a murmur in Eren's deeply submerged mind where it's very quiet and very still.

"You lose, little boy." A wad of spit melts on Eren's cheek. He compresses his lips together as the warm saliva sweats down his face. He closes his eyes.

The giant man wipes his mouth, stands erect, steps over Eren. He swaggers with another victory to the referee and collects his prize. After a moment of deep peace, reluctant to leave the stillness and quiet, Eren opens his eyes. A shard of light pierces his retina, and Eren winces, letting the darkness take him under once again. He sinks, floats, disappears. He returns. The second time he opens his eyes, he braces himself for the bright slit of sunlight to open upon his eye like a wound.

Squinting, he pulls himself to a sitting position and drags his sleeve across his sweaty, bloody, spit-on face. He sits there, heaving for breath, and rises very slowly out of the high tide of oblivion, feeling it stream down his scalp and run off his elbows and hands. His mouth is filled with rust. He spits out scarlet. When he breathes, he feels the sharp edges of his rib bones and a blade of pain knifes through him. He gasps in three daggers of air and tries to stand. He stumbles. A few men laugh.

He straightens and hobbles out of the dirt ring. The winner boasts his next challenge, radiant. Proud. Eren hobbles away.

Before he makes his leave, the referee stops Eren with a firm clasp on his bicep. "You look familiar," he says. "What did you say your name was?"

"Marco."

"I thought it was Thomas."

"I could be Hannah. Or Hannes. Maybe even Carla."

"You fucking with me, kid?"

Eren claps his arm free.

"Not really. Not at all, actually." Eren is not only himself. His life is not only his life. He is the dead. He's been dead since the fall of humanity. He was dead before he'd been born.

"You should take a break and rest," the ref says. "You look like you'll drop dead."

Eren smiles. The ref grimaces.

"I'm all right. I feel great. I feel—I feel." He feels like he could open up his wrists and watch the wounds flower out of him, petal after petal, the weight and the burdened blood splashing color on the ground in ugly roses, as little by little, his weight is lightened and he is lifted. "Thank you, sir. But you don't need to worry about me."

The ref is grimacing. "All right, son."

Regenerated and pure and good as new, Eren sets off.

* * *

 _Bury the dead . . ._

The air is crisp and biting. The sun has expired to a late afternoon languor. Crowds stream steadily past Eren as he navigates the streets. The world is a faint smear, an impression of something that used to be. A rained-on footprint. As he walks, Eren feels very still. Immobile yet walking. An eyehole of inertia as everything around him revolves in a violent turbulence that somehow does not touch him. He is hermetic. Bloodless.

Eren stops at a kiosk. Scroll paintings hang down from a wood awning. His eyes immediately find a painting of Humanity's Strongest Soldier. It's not a perfect representation. The figure in the painting stands at a taller height than that of Captain Levi in flesh and blood. It has broader shoulders, louder eyes, a braver jaw. Made unreal by idealization and fetishization. Something for the eye to consume, a product of fantasy.

"It's our best-seller," a merchant says, referring to the Captain Levi scroll. "We also have the Survey Corps' Commander Erwin." The merchant is a short, rotund man, with gray hair swept thinly across his forehead.

He extends an arm toward the line of paintings: Here's the Rogue Titan, he's our last hope, you know, I heard he roars with all the rage of humanity, I pity the other soldiers, Talk about severe hearing loss, right?: Here's Queen Historia Reiss, she killed the tyrant-turned-titan Rod Reiss, Yes, she killed her own father for the good of the people, Our very own Goddess, Aren't we fortunate?: Here's Squad Leader Hanji Zoe, maniac genius and inventor of the titan guillotines, Ruthless in anger they say, Watch your neck, Hah!: Here's Mikasa Ackerman, the second strongest soldier of our time and, if I do say so myself, the most beautiful woman alive, I got three of these in my sock drawer and take 'em out when I can't finish, Don't tell my wife.

"How much for the Captain Levi scroll?" Eren says. The merchant tells him the price, and Eren snaps open his coin pouch to count his money, though he already knows how much is inside.

"How much for Commander Erwin?"

Once Eren pays the fee, the merchant rolls up the scroll and hands it over. The canvas is grainy and earthy in his hands. He rubs the edges between his fingertips to feel its substance and sturdy material, and then tucks it away. Just as Eren turns from the kiosk, another customer approaches. They bump shoulders. Eren glances down at a man. His face is wrapped behind a black mantle, puffs of his breath misting in the chilled air. Suddenly Eren is gripped by the need to be acknowledged. He wants this person to look at him. He wants this person to see his face. He wants this person to know his name. The man doesn't look at Eren and keeps walking, the mantle eddying behind him like a swirling drop of ink. Eren submits a delayed apology and, head turned, unintentionally catches the knoblike eyes of the merchant, who's old and porcine and uses paintings of Mikasa to arouse him.

Eren says, "Have you thought that maybe you can't finish 'cause it's time to close shop?"

"Sounds like you're trying to say something to me. You're not trying to say something to me, are you, kid?"

"No, it's just—I didn't think a man of your age would have the energy. You know?"

The merchant spits. "Piss off."

The painting of Mikasa wavers in the wind. Eren goes on. Soundlessly his shoes negotiate the street.

What would happen if he disappeared?

The customer turns his head as Eren's back diminishes down the alley, the dark buoy of his hair nodding farther and farther into the distance. A sharp breeze billows the black mantle. The paintings knock against the wood awning. The man's head turns again; the merchant cannot see his face.

"Do you have one of Eren Jaeger?"

"Who?"

"The boy who controls the Rogue titan."

"A boy?"

"A brat."

* * *

 _Do not self-pity . . ._

"Do you have that fancy black tea?" Eren says.

The shopkeeper rifles through the shelves behind her and sets a box on the countertop. "Here you go." She's a full-bosomed woman. In her thirties, probably. She has a luxurious thicket of dark curls situated on the top of her head that looks as though if she tilted her face too far in one direction, it might disturb her equilibrium and unbalance her backbone.

Eren hands her all the money he has left over from his previous purchase. She gives him a rueful look. "I'm sorry, baby. You're a little short."

"By how much?"

The woman bends forward, her hair swinging atop her head. It maintains some bounce after the rest of her has stilled. "Tell you what, I'll make you a deal. I know who you are. You're that titan boy, right? You're Eren Jaeger." He's silent. She smiles. "I recognize you from the newspaper. You look older in person. More rugged." She husks the word rugged and brings her elbows in together.

"It's all right," Eren says. "I'll pay the full amount. I just need to go back to HQ and—"

"I'm offering you a deal, Eren Jaeger, not charity. Understand? I'm not a generous person."

"I understand. As long as it's not charity."

"I will reduce the price of this tea," she says and stretches further across the counter. The top of her dress is unclasped, her elbows tucked tightly together. "In exchange for a kiss."

"A kiss?"

"A kiss." She smiles without showing her teeth. Her voice sinks, and she leers at him through her eyelashes. "And if you give me a reason to, I'll bring the price even lower. How's that? Just show me what that pretty mouth of yours can do."

"I don't know how."

"You don't know how to kiss?"

"No."

"It ain't difficult, honey. You feel your way through it and do whatever your gut tells you."

Her heavy breasts heave against the laces on her dressfront, and her gaze steadies on his. Smiling, she fits her palm over the broad of his hand, and with the delicacy of a razor's edge, like a mother coaxing an apprehensive child, she puppeteers him to reach inside her dress. Eren slips his hand between the stiff fabric with the innocent, abashed curiosity of a little boy—and then he's touching her. He's touching a woman. He's surprised to discover how soft she feels, how fine and supple. Like dough inside velvet.

His blood surges and his gut writhes in an uncomfortable agitation. The same agitation that will afflict him occasionally late at night and confuse and frustrate him and take him back to the trainee barracks where the older recruits would pant in their beds, their starched sheets flapping in the dark, safe from judgement and exposure, knowing that nobody in the room would say anything because they understood one another; they had felt what it was like to burn from a fire within their own skins, the smell of flesh heavy and full in the small barracks making them dizzy with the sound and weight of their own blood.

The same agitation that will make Eren think about the sweat that pearls at Captain Levi's temples and that one strange time in which he had felt the urge to lift away the captain's hair and lick the salt off his forehead and nearly scared himself to death by thinking the thought, and late that night he had to lie in bed, his sheets flapping secretly in the dark, to relieve that uncomfortable, unknown feeling writhing inside him, hissing to himself repeatedly and guiltily, what the fuck? what the fuck? what the fuck? until he squealed one last time in a tight, shrill voice _what the fuck!_

"Do you like it?" the shopkeeper says. "Do you like touching me?"

"Do you like being touched?" Eren says.

"Only when soldier boys like you touch me."

He looks at her. She has dull brown eyes and black stubby eyelashes. He doesn't know her name. He fans out his hand and settles into her powdery skin. Her face starts to shine, her eyes growing dark. He presses his hand flat, searching for it. Where is it? It should be here, right?—Why can't he find it?—There. He finds it, with the heel of his hand, between her chest bones.

"Oh?" she says.

"What?" he says.

"You're feeling my heartbeat."

"Is that abnormal?"

"Between lovers, not really."

"And between strangers?"

"It's a bit odd."

"Oh."

She looks into his eyes and must see something there because she tilts her head and her face adopts an expression of amused surprise. "You're afraid of dying, aren't you?"

"What?"

"You're terrified, shaken to the core. You poor child, a soldier in the Survey Corps who fears death." She squeezes his hand tighter to her breast. "Look at me, baby, look." Her face is so close that he can see the faint reflection of his face in her eyes as if he's looking at an apparition of himself doubled in two flat pools. "You're going to die, and I'm going to die, and that black tea will evaporate, and this tea shop will crumble, and humanity will fall. And—no no don't look away—look here—Nothing lasts, sweetheart. Absolutely nothing."

"What about art? Don't paintings last?"

She laughs without opening her mouth, a throaty humorless sound. "What, like that painting you've got shoved in your pants?" She grins. "Say it does last, who will be there to see it when nobody is left?" Eren doesn't say anything and she reaches back to undo the clip in her hair, shaking the curls so that they fall loose around her face. Behind the derision and nihilism, she's nothing but a naked body and primal instincts. "You're killing me here, making me wait like this. Hurry, now. Come behind the counter."

He doesn't move.

"Want to see me beg, that it?" He doesn't move and she tears free the laces of her dress and bends over the counter while stretching backward, her spine long and incurve, her hips poised at such an angle that Eren can see on the other side of the counter her hand sliding under her skirts, hiking the material over silk stockings and white garter belts. Eren stares, having never before seen a grown woman's underwear, thinking that it's not unlike a soldier's gear with its clasps and buckles and moving parts. She kicks up a leg, hooking her high-heeled shoe on the table's edge, and grabs his hand. "Here, feel me, feel how hot I am." He feels how hot she is, the undergarment moist and thick with musk. His hand falls away.

"You want it too, right?" she says. "Come behind the counter." He remains where he is. "This is the only thing with any meaning, Eren Jaeger. This is the only thing that lets us endure this hell. I'll tell you what's going to happen to you: You'll never see outside these walls and you're going to meet a terrible, exquisitely horrific death. Your future is hopeless and inevitable. And do you know why that is?" Her voice has quickened, and she expels a hot, hasty breath through the mouth, her lips quivering. "Because this is the kind of world we live in. People like you always lose in the end. But enough about that. The only thing that matters is what's under your clothes and what's under mine. Let me show you how to become eternal. Come behind this counter."

"All right."

He goes over the counter and she places one of his hands on her breast, the other between her legs, and surges against him so that he lies back flat across the wooden countertop, all of his body surface yielded up to her. She tells him to make a fist and he does and she grinds against his knuckles, her hair falling around their faces in dark cascading curls, and she starts to pant at him, _Good boy, good boy, You're such a good boy, I'm going to mount you on this counter, You're not afraid, are you? are you?_ _Use your fist, baby, Harder, yes oh God yes._ She's taller than him, long enough to match and surpass his length and overcome him. His fist is slick and hot, the lips of her insides lapping him through the damp, white undergarment.

She pushes up his shirt, throwing opening his unbuttoned pullover, and bursts out of her dressfront, flattening to his chest. She is all soft curves and he is all hard planes, but somehow her body seems to violate his and render him impotent. She draws her knees up onto the counter, hitching her skirts over her stockinged legs. He reaches under her clothes to wrap his fingers around her fleshy unseen hip. Her lips are the shape of a bow and the color of a red heart, and they draw him in like a pull of blood. He fixes a point of reference on her red-heart lips and opens his mouth to receive her mouth. He lets his eyelids slide lower. He can feel the warm vitality on her breath, the warm sweet life.

 _Temporary_ , he thinks and then _temporary_ , as their lips slide together; and then _temporary_ , as their mouths stretch wider; and then _temporary_ , as her heartbeat thunders harder and harder and harder:

 _temporary temporary temporary_

The sound of bells startles him. He opens his eyes and pushes against her, holding her chest off of him. She hugs herself into hiding while Eren cranes his neck back. His perspective is inverted. An upside down Captain Levi stands at the door. Without looking away from Levi, Eren withdraws his hand from the woman's dress and rolls out from under her and onto his belly, the captain's image rotating into its correct orientation. A pebble of heat lingers in his palm. He closes his fingers around it. Quickly it fades. Silent and stolid and a little languid, Captain Levi approaches them and the shopkeeper scrambles to conceal her skin. Eren shrugs out of his pullover to toss it at her.

"How much?" Levi says.

"Excuse me?" There's a flush of color high in the woman's cheekbones, and she's clasping the pullover tight to her front.

"For the tea." She hugs the pullover and doesn't speak. Levi's hand disappears under his mantle and when it returns, he holds a small, copper-clasped pouch. Inside it, coins tumble together. He takes up a few and stacks them metallically on the counter. "This is sufficient, I'm sure." Stiffly she nods her head.

"Get off of there."

Eren swings his legs around, dazed, and descends, the rubber soles of his shoes meeting the floor steadily. Levi claps the tea to his chest. "We're leaving." Eren says nothing and holds the tea in his arms. Flinging a hand over the counter, Levi seizes the pullover hugged to the woman's chest. When he speaks, his voice is phlegmatic and without inflection. "This doesn't belong to you."

She glares and clutches tighter, protesting, as he coolly wrests it from her with calm, strong, nonviolent flicks of his hand, his body unmoving aside from his arm.

"Excuse me, Exc _use_ me," she says, her head rolling in time with the calm but strong side-to-side flicks.

"Captain."

Clutching the pullover in a dead vise, she jerks viciously to the right, the article whipping away in Levi's hand. But Levi holds on, neither loosening nor tightening, nor moving with the jerk, his iron arm held away from his body.

"Why don't you let go?" she says. "He told you to let go."

"It's not yours." His hand starts to move again in those calm, strong flicks. She curses him quietly and mildly, her head rolling.

"Let go. Just let go. You bastard. You son of a bitch—"

"Captain Levi."

Levi releases it and draws the black mantle over his head. Eren follows him out the door. Once they're outside, the box of tea becomes an anchor of guilt in Eren's hand. He carries it as one carries shame and self-loathing. He walks in stride with Captain Levi, each pump of his legs overtaking the inertia and reluctance and fatigue, his body moving with a fatalistic numbness.

"You looked like you were enjoying yourself," Levi says.

"You're angry."

"I'm not. Soldiers don't accept pity handouts. And we especially don't prostitute ourselves for shitty tea. You don't have much shame, do you?"

"I wasn't . . ." But perhaps he was. Perhaps he thought if he gave her his mouth, she would touch him and he would feel her all the way through the stillness of his blood and into the stillness of his mind where she'd start a ripple, and he'd come alive once again. But instead he had felt her stillness, her deadness, an absence of feeling. They had been two corpses moments away from fucking each other.

"This is shitty tea?" Eren extends the box to Levi. "I don't like tea very much. I was getting it for you 'cause I thought it was special. I didn't know it wasn't any good."

A heartbeat of hesitation and then Levi takes the tea and puts it somewhere under the mantle.

They continue walking, though Eren feels caught in ceaseless suspension as everything around him revolves like wheel and axle, uninterrupted; his skeleton is old and weary, and ghosts have made his skin thin. Captain Levi glides soundlessly when he walks.

"You could be right," Eren says. "I might be shameless. I don't think I can afford feeling much shame anymore. Once you've been stripped down and chained up with a metal bit shoved between your teeth . . . What I'm trying to say is I don't think anyone can humiliate me any further than I've already been humiliated."

"Turn down that street," Levi says abruptly.

"Yes sir."

* * *

 _Unburden the heart . . ._

Down the street there's a small shop that has a chimney exhausting a steady shaft of smoke. Captain Levi leads Eren to the shop. In this part of the district, the crowd is thick but mindful. Pedestrians part a path for Levi and Eren to move through, sensing their presences without conscious acknowledgment or visual discernment, swinging around Levi at the last instant, just before their shoulders can collide. Eren follows at Levi's heels, making his shoulders small and insubstantial. On either side of them, kiosks display jewelries and arts and clothing. Levi stops. Eren stumbles into him.

"Sorry," Eren says. Levi raises a hand. "What is it?" Eren ducks forward to see behind the mantle. He sees only the outline of a narrow nose and a rigid, austere mouth. "What?" Eren says again, looking over the churning heads around them.

Outside the activity and the rattle of voices, a man stands static against the wall, an enigmatic figure immobile among the stream of motion, arms crossed, wearing a clean jacket and black pants, the brim of a hat jammed over his face. Slowly, the hatted man squares his chin, an infinitesimal movement against the swift blur of faces. Rather than seeing the man move, Eren feels the sudden bearing down of interrogative eyes and knows the man is watching them, a keen cryptic stare obscured by the hat, closing in on Eren from no source at all.

There's a tug on Eren's sleeve. He looks down.

"Excuse me," a young girl says. She's wearing a dress that swims around her body, her neck and collarbones rising gauntly from a gaping hole, two knobby knees and two naked feet pillaring under her. She has wide black eyes that gleam like glass beads, and brown crusty streaks smear her legs. In her hand she has a red flower. "It's a rose," she says.

"How'd you get a rose? Aren't those rare?"

"Uh-huh, I'm selling it. Do you want to buy it?"

"I don't have any money."

Passively accepting his answer, she nods her head and turns her attention elsewhere. As she turns, the rose tumbles from out of her grasp, red and soundless, landing in the dry dust weightlessly. Eren reaches down to pick it up and recoils. Careful of the thorns, he reaches down again.

"Here." He relinquishes the rose, but before she can receive it, Levi takes it from Eren's hand and allocates a few coins in return.

The girl pockets the coins and says, "Roses symbolize passion and desire. You should give it to the person you love."

"Really?" Eren says. "A rose means all that?"

"Uh-huh," the girl says. "And when a boy gives a girl a rose, she has to do it."

"She has to do what?" Eren says. Her expression is vacuous, depthless, her black reflective eyes unblinking. She doesn't clarify. "Captain?" Eren says, snapping his head toward Levi who's lowered his mantle, his face turned in the other direction. Following Levi's sightline, Eren finds the hatted man slanted against the wall, his position and posture unchanged.

"Who told you that?" Levi says.

"What's she talking about?" Eren says. "I don't understand."

"The man who gave me that rose said so," the girl says.

"Where are your parents?"

Her mouth hardly moves when she replies, her eyes dull and glasslike. "I don't know. Dead, probably."

Levi turns his head, motionless from the neck down, to look at her. "I know someone who'd like to meet you."

"Who?"

"Queen Historia."

"You know the queen?"

"That's right."

She reaches up a hand. Levi stares at the five outstretched fingers in thoughtful unrecognition. When Levi's arm stays slack at his side, Eren clasps her small hand in his and leads her away. "You'll like the queen. But she can be a little strict sometimes."

They walk toward the shop exhausting smoke and when Eren realizes the captain isn't with them, he reverts his head and sees Levi muttering to the man in the hat. He's a thick and tall man. In juxtaposition Levi appears to be a scale model figure.

"That's the man who gave me the rose," the girl says. She kicks out one of her crusty smeared legs, tugging her skirt above her kneecap. "He told me I wouldn't let him in. That's why."

With immense reluctance and oncoming dread, the gears in Eren's mind turn and the pieces click into place. He had known when he saw her legs. He had known when the rose pricked his fingertips. He had known even when he said he didn't. He had known and denied it because the truth horrified him utterly. And now she is looking up at him with empty eyes, foisting the heavy, horrifying truth upon him unignorably. And as much as he would like to keep the veil down over his eyes; as much as he would like to believe that he is hermetic and untouchable, he can feel in his heart the iron drop with a resounding echo and he imagines his wrists coming open, unbleeding. He wants to cry.

Eren sweeps his arms under her knees and back, swooping her up from the ground. She's very light. "How old are you?" he says, distancing himself from what he knows and from the emptiness in her eyes so that he can do what needs to be done with a medical efficiency.

She raises up and puts her small sticky hands on his face. He blinks. "Put me down," she says. And without any warning, she thrusts the top of her head into his. Two red welts appear: one on her head and a matching one on Eren's. He doesn't put her down.

Very suddenly behind them there's a terrible shout, and the girl drags on Eren's neck to see over his shoulder, saying, "What's he doing? Is he coming back?" and Eren doesn't answer, spiriting her swiftly into the shop.

He finds a kindly doughy woman to help them. She says she's the chef's wife. After a vague explanation, his panic disguised as self-possessed urgency, Eren lets the woman take the child into the back of the pastry shop where nobody can disturb them. Eren sits down heavily in a wooden chair, his face in his hands. Someone takes custody of the chair next to him. Without looking up, Eren knows it's Captain Levi.

"Where did she go?" Levi says.

"That was dried blood on her legs," Eren says. "Did you know that?" Levi stares at Eren, his forehead unlined and without expression. "There was a lot of it, too." Eren hears his own voice at a distance, foreign. Hollow. Levi looks away.

"Where is she now?"

"I found a woman," Eren says, his voice alienated from himself. "The chef's wife. I figured a woman would know best how to help. She's so little. I can't tell her age, though. She could be older but underfed. Eleven, at the oldest."

"Where did they go?"

"They went that way. Through that door. She's so little. I don't know how she—and that man was—I'm not an idiot. I know it happens sometimes. I mean, Mikasa was almost—but she wasn't." There's a tremor in Eren's hands, and he feels weak and wonders if he forgot to eat this morning. He stares straight ahead, unblinking, his eyes a little wide. The distant, foreign voice goes on, hollow and steady: "I know it happens sometimes. To little boys too. But I don't understand it. I don't understand why. Why did this happen? She's so little. He could've killed her."

"What a pointless question to ask." Levi still has the rose in his possession. "It's a cruel and unfair world. But you said you already knew that." He tilts the flower at Eren, the whorl of petals curling infinitely around its epicenter. "Perhaps after these past few weeks, all quiet and cozy inside these walls, with nothing to worry about but titan experiments, you've become too comfortable. You've forgotten that this is where you come from."

"No, I could never forget that," Eren says. "But I can never get used to it, either."

When the woman returns, the child walks by her side and smiles at them with an impersonal kindliness. She pads barefooted to Levi and says, "You kept my rose. It's such a pretty color, isn't it?"

The hand not holding the rose settles upon the girl's head and brushes the hair back from her face. Eren watches, thinking, That's the captain's hand? then looks at the red rose, thinking, Why? Why? Why? Why? He balls both of his hands into fists, restraining them by his thighs, in order to keep himself from reaching over and tearing out its petals.

The chef's wife shows the girl the pastries and sweets behind the glass counter display. The girl looks in, her grimy fingers fanned out against the glass, and suggests that the scary man and the old man come look too. Eren figures himself the scary man and Levi the old man, but then thinks that maybe it's the other way around; that Levi is the scary one and Eren is the old one because having a metal bit shoved between his teeth has aged and deteriorated him. He's been dead since the fall of humanity, after all.

As Eren approaches, the thick smell of sugar begins to make him lightheaded. With each forward step, he becomes weak and anemic and loses the strength in his legs. A violent emptiness opens up inside of him and he can't think about anything other than the bottomlessness in his belly and the faintness behind his eyes and When's the last time he ate? He can hear Mikasa inside his head:

Did you eat breakfast, Eren?

I'm not hungry.

Did you eat dinner?

I think so.

You look . . . unwell.

Jean was there—

I know what you're doing.

What am I doing?

You're making Mikasa worry, is what you're doing.

I'm not hungry.

Armin was there—

Hungry or not, if you don't have enough energy, your endurance will suffer. Do you think you can harden your skin if you're weak from skipping breakfast?

You're right, Armin . . .

Spinning about-face, Eren surges out the door. He doubles over and dry heaves into the street from the nausea of prolonged not-eating and barely manages to stay on his feet by shutting his eyes and willing the dizziness away and convincing himself that he is not about to pass out, he is NOT about to pass out. He's sweating. Another wave of nausea crests at the back of his gullet and his mouth gapes open, bloodlessly, as he retches up thick saliva and hunger. He makes no sound.

Along the street, people avert their eyes and hurry past. Eren's face grows pasty and cold, and he might be leaking tears. His legs bend under him like hollow reeds in the wind. Before he can crumple to his knees, he gropes out a hand toward the wall—but finds something else. Helping him stand, two hands catch him under the armpits and hold him up. Eren spins, an arm flung out, and seizes Levi around the neck, hurling his whole dead weight at him. Levi receives and absorbs the momentum and gravity, taking Eren into his arms with a low grunt, his palms clapping to Eren's back. Eren's legs melt under him, dissolved into two limp doll legs; he cannot feel them. As he starts to slide to the ground, Levi lifts and holds Eren up from his body to pull him down against his chest and secure him there.

Eren's heart thuds tremendously into Levi's chest, and his breath comes out in shallow pants against his ear. With an arm grappled around Levi's neck, Eren gradually recovers through deep-breathing, willpower, and call of duty: He cannot be sick, he cannot despair, he's humanity's last hope. With the back of his wrist, he scrubs his mouth and eyes and stares blindly down the street, not seeing but feeling strangers watching him. Delirious, he hides his clammy face in Levi's hair.

"You look like shit," Levi says.

"Feel like it too," Eren says.

"Hold on to me." The captain pulls Eren's arm around his shoulders and lets Eren lean on him for a while longer.

From under his mantle, Levi produces his coin pouch and tosses it to the little girl who has been standing near the door, watching diligently.

"Go in there and buy a chocolate bar for me. Spend the rest on whatever you want."

The shop door opens and shuts, and Eren's cold sweat smears onto Levi's neck, his whole body wrapped around the captain limply.

"Did you kill him?" Eren says.

"Survey Corps disembowels man in public," Levi says. "That'd make an unfavorable headline, don't you think?"

"You were supposed to kill him. It's what he deserved. I would've done it."

"I know you would have. That's why you're still a kid."

When the girl returns, she has crinkled in her hand a brown paper bag, which she gives to Levi. Dimly Eren wonders how long he's been standing outside, suppressing his hunger-nausea, and how long the captain has been holding him on his feet.

 _What would he do if I disappeared?_

Levi says, "Are you all right?"

"Yes, I'm all right," Eren says.

"I wasn't talking to you."

"Yes, I'm all right," the girl says from somewhere behind Levi's leg.

"Go back inside and buy yourself something."

Eren hears the shop door open and shut. "I feel like a pathetic weakling next to her."

"Next to her, that's exactly what you are." From out of the bag, Levi withdraws a block wrapped in parchment paper. He undoes the paper, revealing the end of something brown and hard. He snaps off a square piece and offers it to Eren.

"What is it?" Eren says.

"Chocolate."

"It doesn't look very appealing, Captain. It's brown and it's hard."

"Open your mouth."

"I don't know if I should. I'm not feeling well."

"That was an order, Eren. Not a request."

Eren opens his mouth and Levi sets the square on his tongue. "Go on, eat it."

As he chews, Eren puts a hand over his mouth. "It's good." Although his hand hides his mouth, a smile shows in his eyes. "It's really good."

He eats another square, chewing with a contemplative deliberation. The chocolate melts in his mouth and washes over his palate. When he swallows, he sucks any lasting residue from his teeth and tongue. "It tastes good, but it makes me feel good too. I don't know. I can feel it all over me, if that makes sense."

"Your energy is too low. That's why."

"Oh."

Levi breaks off another square and holds it to Eren's mouth.

"I can feed myself, Captain," he says, head turning. Levi, lightly putting his hand on Eren's cheek, turns his head like a pivoting toy. They look into one another's faces. Levi's eyes seem not to move, but somehow focus on Eren's mouth without looking away from his eyes. He spreads Eren's lips apart with the chocolate square, pushing it past Eren's teeth, sliding it deeper into his mouth until the pads of his fingertips meet the full flesh of Eren's lips. Eren closes his eyes as he chews.

"You're just like Mikasa," he says. "Mothering me like I'm helpless."

"Mothering you, huh?"

"Yes, mothering me. I'm not a child, you know. You don't have to feed me."

There's another snap of the chocolate bar and Eren opens his eyes upon Levi. He has in his fingers another piece of chocolate suspended near Eren's mouth. "I just said—"

"I'm not deaf."

Eren looks into Levi's face, and Levi looks into Eren's. Acquiescing, Eren sighs and allows himself to be handfed. Again Levi's fingertips touch his mouth. This time they push a little too hard; Eren's lips come apart on them. He tastes salt and metal and cocoa dust, and not very many people know what the captain's fingers taste like; not very many people have felt his calluses against their mouths. The captain's fingertips can become soft, and not very many people know that the captain can become soft.

Levi's hand falls away, glittering faintly. "Sorry," Eren says. Levi is looking at him.

"Why did you buy that stupid thing?"

"Which stupid thing?" Eren says.

"The scroll painting."

"I just wanted it."

"If you wanted a picture of me, I'm sure there are plenty of wanted posters still lying around. They're a little more accurate, in my opinion."

"I'd rather not remember you as a fugitive."

"I understand. You'd rather remember someone who doesn't exist."

Levi looks down the street, his arm hanging limp by his side. His hand is still glittering.


	2. Part Two

_I can't, I can't, I can't . . ._

On the roof of MP HQ, with a starlit sky blinking down on them, Levi drinks from a tall bottle of booze, steadily, his head bent back, throat open and lurching. The air doesn't move where they are; the roof of the taller, adjacent building cuts into the wind so that it shears off around them and prevents the sounds of voices and movements from carrying to where they are. Inside a silent pocket of solitude, they sit on the edge of the roof, their legs hanging under them, and look on at the quieting district. Kerosene lamps throb in the night, as mothers put their children to bed; and husbands make love to their wives; and the bravest soldiers clasp their lovers to their hearts; and the smartest soldiers lie in the dark, listening to their own breath. The bottle lowers from Levi's face, the liquid splashing against the glass. He thrusts it, half-empty, toward Eren.

"I'm underage," Eren says, not taking the bottle.

"I speculate, Eren, at the rate you're going, you'll be dead long before me. What did the other trainees call you—the suicidal bastard?" Eren nods, Yes, that's what they called him. "I believe every soldier should experience intoxication at least once in their lifetime." Eren takes the bottle, sips modestly, sets it down.

"Chocolate and alcohol in one day," he says. "Aren't you spoiling me?"

"You're one to talk."

"What do you mean?" Eren says.

Levi withdraws the box of tea from his mantle. "This." He sets it down.

"I thought it was shitty?"

The wash of moonlight illuminates Levi in profile. His mouth has relaxed some. "The tea wasn't shitty. The price was shitty."

"I'm sorry. You weren't supposed to pay for it."

"That's not what I'm talking about," Levi says. He pauses, then clears his throat. "In any case, it wasn't worth the cost."

"How much was the chocolate?"

"It doesn't matter. The reward was enough."

"It was really good," Eren says. "I'd pay an arm and a leg for it, but I guess that's not saying much." He looks at Levi meaningfully.

"Yeah, I get it," Levi says.

"Since you know—"

"Yes, Eren. I get it."

"They'd just grow back."

". . ."

"Like a disgusting lizard's tail."

"Are you an idiot?" Levi says.

The corner of Eren's lip smiles, a weary, isolated movement, his face unchanged apart from his mouth. "I didn't eat all of your chocolate, did I?"

"There's some left." Levi picks up the bag, passing it to Eren. Eren lifts a hand.

"No, no. I've had too much already," he says. "But I'm not opposed to having more of the booze." Levi passes him the bottle. The bottom slants from Eren's face, the liquid burning down his throat until not a drop clings to the glass. The alcohol sits like a hot stone in his belly, heavy and solid. A faint glow starts to shine through his skin as if he's smoldering from the inside, and his movements acquire a sluggish uselessness.

"Drink in moderation, you little shit," Levi says. "What if titans attack and I've got Humanity's Miracle plastered?"

"I'm all right."

"How selfish. I'll have to do all the work myself."

"I said I'm all right."

"You won't be."

Endless vertiginous darkness swells up around Eren and up his throat, and he tastes on his breath the heady particles of the booze. Warmer than blood, Eren's skin seems to soften on his skeleton and melt away. For a moment, he hangs his head, asleep, and then he wakes, raising his head, upright and open-eyed; all of it happening, sleep and wake, in a matter of seconds. He squints at Levi, watching his thin pale lips blur with movement. He hears a voice with a flat tin quality boil up from some place very deep. The voice ceases—and almost simultaneously Levi's lips cease to move.

"What did you say?" Eren says.

"I said don't tell your girlfriend I got you drunk," Levi repeats, in his flat tin voice that seems to boil up from someplace very deep.

"Girlfriend? What girlfriend?"

"You think I haven't seen you holding hands with the queen every day?"

"The queen? _Our_ queen? Queen Historia? Oh, oh, I see. We hold hands because it helps bring back my memories. It's not my choice."

"That's right. If you didn't have the memory of a senile old man, you wouldn't have to."

"How's she my girlfriend if it's not my choice?"

"It seems to me your grip's a little too firm."

Eren snorts and his head swims. "I wouldn't want to interfere with Ymir's love life. She said she'll make Historia her wife one day, though I don't know how that will happen if she's not around. I've never understood Ymir. I don't know what side she's on. To be honest, I think she's on her own side. She doesn't care about anyone but herself. No, well, she cares about Christa—Historia—whichever." Eren feels his face with his fingers, the heat under his skin, the oil coming from his pores. "I feel terrible. I think I'm drunk."

"Aren't they both women? How would they procreate?"

"Who? What? Is that important?"

"Most likely."

Eren looks at Levi. "Then maybe you should procreate." A cold distaste comes over Levi's expression. "What?" Eren says. His head is still swimming. "Choose a woman. Any one will do. Or is it the thicker ones who are better at childbearing?"

Levi removes his eyes from Eren, putting them on the night's horizon instead. "This conversation's over."

"Well you started it."

"Survey Corps can't have kids for obvious reasons."

Eren looks at the ground, his hands loose at his sides, and nods. "But they can have intercourse. I saw it in the barracks, men sleeping with women. Sometimes I saw men doing it with other men. And back when I lived in the country, I even saw some guys doing it with cattle."

Levi says, "Something tells me that's not the way it's supposed to be done."

"That sort of thing seems meaningless," Eren says.

"We're not talking about cattle still, are we?"

"No, I meant kissing. Having intercourse too, I guess, if you don't intend to have a family. None of it will help us survive."

"Why won't it?"

"Well. It's." Eren looks at Levi. "You think it might?"

"Don't be stupid."

"You've never?"

"No."

"Why?" Eren says. "If you don't mind me asking."

"You're asking me why I haven't had a woman?"

"Or anyone at all." Eren points at the scroll painting. "You're Humanity's Strongest. It's not as though no one's interested."

"I'm the one who's not interested."

"Oh."

They fall quiet, and the air is still, and the throbbing glow of the kerosene lamps has been extinguished. Eren sits, motionless, on the edge of the roof. On the inside he swims in alcoholic confusion. He thinks that he could fall. He thinks that it'd be okay if he fell. He imagines the accidental slip and the feeling of weightlessness, the final impact—the pain. The splattering of red, the perfume of rust. The rip of his bones as they fuse and mend and crack back together, and he becomes good and new and pure again. His stomach is empty and hot. The moon washes over Levi. His mouth is relaxed and soft but unsmiling. Levi has kept the rose and is rotating the stem in his hand.

"It's dying," he says.

"You do realize what you're holding in your hand," Eren says. "What happened because of it?"

Levi puts his nose against the petals. "It smells too sweet. It won't last much longer."

"Throw it out," Eren says.

"Why?"

"It's dying, isn't it?"

"I just said that." Levi turns the stem slowly in his fingers, breathing in the sweet smell of dying petals.

"Throw it out," Eren says again.

"No."

"How can you keep it?"

Levi looks closely at the moribund blossom. The petals curl away from the stem, sagging in mortal inevitability. Eren reaches out. "Give it here. I'll do it." Levi keeps the rose in his possession. "Captain Levi."

"What?" Levi says.

"Give me the rose."

"You're ordering me?"

"Just give it here."

"Hmm?" Levi looks at him coldly. "You're drunker than I thought."

"Captain," Eren says. "I don't mean any disrespect. Just give me the rose, _please_." Levi doesn't move. " _Captain._ " Levi moves his hand deliberately away. Eren glares at Levi with hot, blazing eyes; and Levi looks at Eren, cold and calculating. They watch each other in silence.

The night surges on, and the alcohol has disrupted Eren's homeostasis, hindering his judgment and equilibrium. His head is swimming, and his emotions are unbound and floundering. And again he thinks that he could fall—and become good and new and pure. And everything would be okay again.

And as Eren swims in the turbulence of his own emotions, Levi's iron body is held immobile, movement poised, however, in his muscles, ready to spring. He's coiled up like a whip, waiting on edge. Waiting for something to snap . . . There's a pause, a portent. A standstill as if a pendulum has reached its highest point, held in existential uncertainty, suspended in the air just before the backswing.

Eren plunges forward. "Give it—" Levi holds him back, a hand rigid against Eren's chest, reaching the rose away from him. "Give it to me, Captain."

Levi shoves him aside, the rose held away. Eren flings out a hand, scrabbling, thrusting bodily with his shoulder in an act of drunken ferocity and passion, struggling against Levi, who jerks and stretches his arm back. "GIVE IT TO ME."

Levi shoves him off and switches the rose to his weak hand. Holding the rose away, he seizes Eren by the chin with the strong hand, his fingertips digging into Eren's cheek with such force that Eren's mouth puckers and bulges open. Controlled, calm, and detached, Levi holds Eren's jaws apart, curling his fingers hard, pushing them deep into Eren's cheek such that his mouth bulges out further, a quivering enflamed protuberance, and Eren stops groping for the rose to grope at Levi's hand instead, saying, _Ah-ah-ah,_ thin glistening drool running down his chin.

"What's the matter with you?" Levi says, his lip lifting on his teeth.

"YOU SHOULD HAVE KILLED HIM," Eren says, gasping, the words slurred and thick and incomprehensible if not for the irrepressible voice that doesn't seem to be a voice at all, but a bodiless and ubiquitous roar. He sobs breath. "YOU SHOULD HAVE FUCKING TORN HIM APART. WHY DIDN'T YOU—" Levi grips Eren's mouth into silence. Choking, Eren claws at Levi's one hand with both of his, saliva pouring down his chin and running hotly into Levi's palm.

Levi speaks without volume or violence, but without gentleness either. "Listen to me and listen well. Killing that man and throwing out this rose can't change what happened. Nod your head that you understand." Eren nods his head and Levi releases him. The imprint of Levi's fingers manifests on Eren's skin, savage and distinct. Eren wipes his chin with the back of his hand.

Levi continues, "We were in a crowd, and we have a public image to uphold. You can't act on emotion alone." Watching the five fingerprints bruise across Eren's face, Levi rotates the rose slowly and gently by the stem. "I understand it's upsetting. But you need to use that modest mind of yours to think, Eren."

Eren's irises whirl with a passionate and personal unforgiveness. "Why keep it?"

"She liked the color. And so do I."

"The color? The _color?_ The natural thing to do is get rid of it."

With an expression heatless and inscrutable, Levi extends the rose slowly at Eren. As Eren goes to take it, Levi says, "Would you destroy the world too?"

"What?"

"You'll destroy a fragile thing because a person used it to do something cruel. Does that make this rose responsible?"

"No, that . . . _demon_ was responsible."

"But you'll destroy this rose because it was used by a demon? It wasn't given a choice, was it?" Eren's outstretched hand shrinks back. "Of course not, what a stupid question to ask. This is only a flower." Levi holds the rose, red and withering, between their two bodies. "You want to throw it out? Well, go on, take it. I won't stop you." Eren doesn't take it, staring at Levi with those five fingerprints still hot on his face. Levi goes on, "It's cruel, what happened because of this rose. Still . . ."

Levi plucks a petal from the flower and releases it over the edge of the roof. They watch it float and catch the wind current. It swirls and sails into the black night.

"She liked it." Levi extends the flower to Eren again, this time his eyes steadying upon Eren with a quality softer but unyielding all the same. "To her it meant something special." Eren takes it.

The rose is limp and soft on his fingertips. Closing his eyes, his heart beating steady and slow, he lifts the flower to his face, feeling it against his lips and then against his eyelids. When he breathes in, he smells a motley of sweetness and death and blood and tears. "She said it meant passion and desire," Eren says, opening his eyes. "But when I look at it, I see thorns."

"What's the difference?" Levi says.

"What do you mean?"

"Doing it is only another version of pain and violence."

"Doing it?" Eren sets down the flower, turning at the waist. "Captain Levi. Violence and sex aren't supposed to be the same thing. It's not right. Doing it with cattle seems less wrong, even." Eren puts his hands on the back of his neck and pushes them up into his hair. "Traffickers were going to sell Mikasa, and so I killed them. Nobody asks why I did it. People take one look at me and call me a monster."

"You did what you thought necessary. You weren't wrong," Levi says. "But can you really blame people for thinking that way? This is only my opinion, Eren, but you don't look like much of a hero."

"Yes, I know."

"Good, then," Levi says. "You say they're different, but I've understood violence and sex as the same since I can remember."

 _Stay out there No no Leave it shut darling Hush now Everything's all right He'll be done soon Shhh stay quiet for me You always listen to your mother so well_

beyond the fatal shut door the bed was thudding and there was a clap of hand on cheekbone and Levi seized the doorknob and said _Mom_ and she said _Hush now Listen to your mother_ and so he hushed and listened to his mother as an implacable voice beyond the door said whore and slut and you little bitch and if you don't shut your mouth right now I'll make your bastard son watch and teach him young how to be a man

After that night she grew ill, her flesh rotting from her wounded thighs outward, and Levi wouldn't understand why she'd been alive one day and dead the next until he was a soldier and saw it happen again to the prostitutes that the higher-ups purchased. Their desiccated corpses were disposed of, treated with indifference—disgust, even—as pious men stuck their noses in the air and said, God will cleanse these holy walls of every last filthy whore. And Levi looked at them coldly and said, It seems more reasonable to eliminate the demand, Gut every last filthy pig who buys women. They ignored him. Levi drew out his switchblade, wiping it with a cloth to a hot silver glare: And castrate the filthy ministers who buy little boys.

Eren touches Levi's hand and Levi flinches on the inside. On the outside, he holds stock-still and erect.

"If you've misunderstood all this time," Eren says, "I'm guessing you haven't kissed anyone." Levi turns his face full on Eren, blinking. "I hadn't either before today."

"Before the tea shop hag?" Levi says.

"Yeah."

"Did you enjoy it?"

"I don't know. But I'd like to try it again."

Eren's hand comes off of Levi's hand to take the mantle. With a light pull, the material slides off of Levi's shoulders, hissing, and puddling on the ground like a pool of black blood. Underneath he's wearing a plain black shirt. Eren puts his hand against Levi's exposed throat, feeling the pulse point jumping steadily under the skin.

"It's not that difficult," Eren says quietly. "You just—feel your way through it and listen to your gut."

Searching Levi's face, Eren leans in and waits, still searching, his eyes focusing slowly on Levi's mouth like two turning dials. His eyes are old and weary, and Levi sees an image: a metal bit jammed between Eren's jaws, chains suspending his arms out from his body, his posture bowed in a subservient kneel, defeated. That flame in Eren's heart, so fragile, so unreliable, sometimes a roaring blaze and sometimes a thin flicker, has been ultimately extinguished.

 _Is it really meaningless . . .?_ Levi wonders. _After losing everything, he'll descend into infinite emptiness . . .? Humans put his will in chains . . . and now that flame is gone._

Levi lets Eren close the distance, holding his body still and keeping his eyes open, even as Eren brings his face down—and even as his mouth slants firmly across Levi's.

Long eyelashes and a straight nose stretch to each corner of Levi's sight. And although he awaits the kiss knowingly—watching the distance slowly diminish, Eren's eyelashes becoming longer and blacker and more distinct, the smell of Eren's skin and clothing surging closer; a mix of chocolate and blood and booze— Although all of this happens within Levi's knowledge, he's nevertheless surprised by the contact as if Levi has, up until now, only been a spectator, separate from what was happening. That what was happening—Eren coming closer, closer, _You haven't kissed anyone . . ._ —was happening to somebody else. Not Levi. Not until now. Levi feels as though he has just arrived. Been delivered here, suddenly, into this moment. Eren's mouth is soft, warm.

Now awakened fully to Eren's touch, Levi trembles and his heart begins to seize with a hard, painful arrhythmia. Levi's blood surges, pulsing wildly against Eren's hand. An emotion and a thought boil up from an underground vault of his consciousness where he's kept them suppressed and unrealized by pure mechanical instinct. The thought, the emotion, the admiration: I am captivated by him. But now Levi knows, the mechanics of his instinct abruptly and irreparably disassembled. The shield and the iron armor crack apart. His eyes close. I am captivated by him. Another piece of armor crumbles away. Behind his eyelids the image continues: Eren defeated, raw and naked, on his knees, the flame in his heart cold and dead. Now Levi removes the metal bit, slick with drool and blood, from Eren's mouth; then he unlocks the chains from his arms, lifting Eren from his knees to his feet. Eren won't look at Levi, head hung, ashamed of himself: It's all right, Levi would say. You can lose again and again, as long as you get up and keep fighting . . .

Eren has his hand on Levi's throat, and both of Levi's arms remain at his sides. Neither of them has moved to touch the other, only kissing with a restrained curiosity.

Still restrained and still curious, Eren's lips come open and so do Levi's, and when he feels Eren's tongue, thick and wide, push hesitantly forward, Levi pulls it in between his lips and into his mouth, reaching out with both hands to drag Eren's face down and deepen the kiss. He can taste on Eren's tongue the metallic memory of the bloodstained bit. Eren holds back, exhaling on a low, feeble sound that Levi can feel on his mouth. And then Eren turns his face away.

Levi watches Eren's lips retreat, growing smaller and distant, as if he can will Eren's tongue back where it was behind his teeth. His blood continues to pound, beating rapidly against Eren's hand. Levi expels a hard breath through his nose. Eren wipes Levi's mouth dry with his thumb. They say nothing, Eren feeling Levi's heartbeat in the artery going through his throat, their lips damp and gleaming. They look at each other. Eren's face is shut and depthless.

He releases Levi and then lies down on his back, flat and rigid like a recumbent effigy. The wells of his eyes catch silver beams of moonlight.

"Have you ever felt guilty for being alive?" Eren says, lifting his hand at the sky, palm out and flat. The pearlescent moon pulls the shadows of Eren's fingers across his face like slashes.

"No," Levi says and draws up a leg, resting an elbow on his knee. "Is that why you let that streetfighter beat the shit out of you?"

"What?"

"I saw it. You got your ass handed to you. It was embarrassing to watch." Levi stares at Eren and when he speaks, his voice is calm and uncritical. "Did you want to feel sorry for yourself?"

Eren lets his hand fall to his chest. "I wanted my mind to go quiet. That's all."

"I know of simpler ways to do that."

Eren turns his face toward Levi, dispassionate and blank, his eyes landing accidentally on the leather sheath strapped to his calf. An interest gradually overcomes Eren's idle facial muscles, the expression taking shape with a slow, arduous movement like a face afflicted by neural impairment. The interest that finally emerges is of a quality similar to that of sexual hunger. Before Levi understands what the change in Eren's face means, Eren surges over and whips the knife out of the sheath. His eyes are all pupils.

"Hey," Levi says.

"Do you always carry a blade with you?" Eren says.

"No."

Levi watches Eren gauge the knife's sharpness by lightly scraping the threshold across his knuckles. Under the blade, the bite's pressure pushes the color from Eren's skin, raising patches of bloodless yellow-white. Eren's eyes have darkened the way the shopkeeper's eyes had darkened when she looked at Eren. Levi stretches out a hand.

"Give it back to me, Eren," he says. "That's an order."

"Why?"

"You'll disobey me?"

"No sir."

"Give it here, then."

Eren holds on to the knife. "Want to hear something funny? During training I saw two of the other recruits watching the sunset. One girl asked her friend if she knew what the sunset looked like. And her friend said No, what does it look like? And the girl said it looked like the sun had slit its wrists and let its blood run into the sky. Ha ha ha."

"I'm not laughing," Levi says.

"You never laugh."

"What are you saying? I'm giggly as hell."

Eren is startled into laughter—and comes up short in a kind of dumb amazement. He stares at Levi. "Your sense of humor is . . . unexpected."

"I don't know what you mean." Levi closes his fingers around Eren's forearm and slowly, very carefully extracts the knife from his grasp. "Have you been eating?"

"Yes."

"Mikasa reported you've been skipping meals."

"I don't remember skipping any meals."

Levi sheathes the knife. "Hanji is going to keep a closer eye on you. Make sure you're not doing anything to compromise the titan experiments."

"I wouldn't compromise them on purpose."

"I know."

"I can't remember things very well," Eren says. "I don't know if I ate this morning. I remember thinking about eating this morning. But I don't know if I did."

"Eren." Levi claps his leg twice and stretches out an open hand, summoning Eren closer. At first Eren raises his head from where he's lying on the ground and stares, dull and uncomprehending, at the beckoning gesture. Then he drags himself weightily over to Levi and lays his temple on Levi's thigh.

Levi says, "Tell me what's making your mind so loud that you can't remember things _—_ and that you want to be beaten bloody."

"I see them," Eren says. "All the time. Everyone who's died because of me. I feel responsible."

"Don't flatter yourself. You're not the reason they died. It was—"

"Titans. I know, I know. But they died thinking that I was something special, that I'd be their trump card. If humanity is betting on trash like me—"

"Humanity IS betting on trash like you. I know that's a demanding burden to place on a kid. And I don't expect you to accept it willingly. But that is your role. Do you understand?"

"I know, I know. But what if I can't?"

"You don't have that choice, you little shit."

Squeezing his eyes shut, Eren turns his cheek into Levi's leg and opens his mouth to breathe in the crisp air, taking it down his throat and into his chest, pulling it deep inside his belly. The hot wave of emotion inside his skull recedes. He closes his mouth and begins to fade. He becomes very still.

Reaching over, Levi seizes the furled scroll painting that's been sitting, forgotten, by Eren's knee. "Want to know what I think? I think the guy who painted this piece of shit had an agonizing bowel blockage that fucked with his aesthetic eye." Eren shakes with voiceless laughter. "Erwin's wasn't bad. Apart from his face, of course. But that couldn't be helped." Eren laughs again, harder, soundless, and then flings an arm over his eyes and starts to cry. Levi puts down the scroll and lays his hand palm up on the ground.

In the full moon's light, the rose throws a small shadow jagged with thorns.

"I can understand your feelings," Levi says, looking at the solitary scroll painting, perfect and unwrinkled, neatly tied closed with string. "However, if you possess the power to change things, you bear the responsibility to do so. You say you want freedom. But how can you realize that dream when it's your power that enslaves you?"

Eren sobs into his elbow, loud and uncontrollable now, his abdominal muscles retching up a warning of the hot booze in his belly. His throat burns as the acid rises from his stomach and then ebbs away to his chest, sitting there as solid and sharp as a rock. Still Levi's hand lays limp, palm up on the ground.

"I don't have an answer for you, and I can only speak from my own experience," Levi says. "I perform the role expected of me and abandon everything else, including my dreams. Are you prepared to do that?"

Eren's head disappears under both of his arms. He disappears entirely—receding into two phantom eyes and an unbodied stream of consciousness. "I don't have a dream. I'm going to fail and I'm going to die. It's my fate. I don't even know what's right or wrong anymore."

"After everything that's happened, you still believe there's such a thing as right and wrong?"

Levi brings his limp, upturned hand off the ground to take Eren's wrists and remove them from his phantom eyes. "There's no such thing as right and wrong; it's not that simple. Only a child believes in good and evil."

In each of Eren's wrists, two delicate cords and a fine blue pulse run beneath the skin. The cords glide and pull into taut cables, as Eren makes his hands into fists. He wrests his arms from Levi's grasp.

"If there's no such thing as right and wrong, then how do we know who to fight?" Eren says.

"You're still looking for someone who deserves to lose, Eren. Haven't you considered that perhaps you're the one who's wrong?"

Levi swings back and feels on his face a displacement of air in the wake of Eren's fist, the aftermath of a motion that has missed contact by a small margin. Before Eren can find his wits and recuperate and try again, Levi's hand is wrapping Eren's jaw, once again holding his teeth apart. Eren glares up at him, his mouth glistening and puckered open, from where he's still lying, belly up, in Levi's lap.

"You tried to hit me," Levi says, almost surprised. Eren glares, silent, furious, his lips strained and gaping like a fish's. Moisture stands bright in his eyes. "It must be infuriating to have your illusions shattered—and so tactlessly, too. You can cry about it if you want."

"I'm not crying," Eren says between Levi's fingers, the consonants nonexistent without the use of his teeth.

"That's good, then. It doesn't matter whether or not you have a dream because a guy like you can't have dreams. Your place is here in the blackest pit of hell. You're a titan— No . . . you're worse. You're a _monster._ "

Still holding Eren's teeth apart, Levi bends his head and slides his tongue inside Eren's swollen, puckered mouth. Eren goes slack, eyes shut, both of his arms folding into his chest. He clutches reflexively at his shirt in fists. The hand around Eren's jaw softens—and then Levi is caressing Eren's face, as if he's subdued the violent mechanical instinct that he learned in the underground and now his hands communicate to Eren's skin nothing but gentleness and compassion. He draws back and watches Eren's eyes slowly come open. They open halfway as though an onset of drowsiness has suddenly stricken him.

Through a dark, thickness in his throat, Eren says, "If I choose to fight you, I'll lose. And it's not because I deserve to lose. And it's not because you were right and I was wrong, and you deserve to win. It's because you're stronger than me. And the strong always win." Levi looks back at Eren tenderly.

"Which means if I'm enslaved by my power"—Eren reaches up to touch Levi's face—"then you're enslaved by yours."

Levi leans his head into Eren's palm and closes his eyes, and he could be grieving, with that calm melancholic expression on his face.

"That makes you a monster too," Eren says in undertone.

Levi exhales what may be a low, humorless laugh, and when he speaks again, his voice comes up from a deep, quiet, placid place. "I'm nothing like you. I'm not nearly as scary."

Eren snorts. "That's what you think."

Levi puts his lips to the delicate, blue pulse in Eren's wrist and closes his eyes. "Well . . . Someone's got to keep that monster in you in line."

"Captain . . ." Eren's voice is soft. "I think I'm beginning to understand you."

"Am I really so esoteric? Or is it that you're exceptionally dense?"

"Both, probably."

"How unlucky of us."

Levi opens his eyes and wraps his arms under Eren, bringing him near. Eren's face lays open and unguarded at Levi. "What if it's not meaningless?" Levi says. "I can't say I know for certain. I haven't the experience to make that call." He leans his forehead against Eren's forehead, his chest expanding with a substantial indrawn breath. He closes his eyes again. "You said it doesn't have to be violence, and I'll trust your judgment. So tell me one last time, Eren, and I'll believe in your answer: Is it meaningless?"

The answer comes out unsteady and weak, the warmth of Eren's forehead sliding against Levi's, as he turns his head from side to side and side to side: _I don't know I don't know I don't know—_


	3. Part Three

Separate articles of clothing are strewn around like plot points on a map, charting the gradual transition across the rooftop, as Eren and Levi had moved, caught up in each other's arms, kissing hard, not knowing, exactly, how desire worked, but feeling its urgency, like that of mortal crises, as though this were the last night, the last hour, the final moment.

They had gone blind to the world, blind with grip and helplessness so that their hands had met nothing but things to seize and take, removing one thing after another, until they had both been bare, feeling their naked bodies, at first chilled by the night air, start to warm in each other's heat, then start to burn with their own warming blood, and even after that, with their clothing gone, their rapacious hands, blind and helpless with desire, had still met nothing but things to seize and take, grasping at each other's uncovered bodies now, filling their palms with muscle and flesh, seizing whatever had come between the skins of the their palms and the beating hearts in one another's chests.

Unprepared for the desperation, the single-mindedness, of desire, they had been kissing so hard, so urgent, that they hadn't known how any two people could be as ferociously together as they were, hellbent and broken, needing more and more and _more_ —

And it was strange, the lens that desire had pulled over their eyes, so that the rooftop became the perfect place to lie down on, despite the fact it was laid with concrete. Beds and furniture and softer surfaces, though much more practical, hadn't crossed their minds. Because _Right here, Right now_ was a symptom of desire. Time, when desire was involved, became at once ephemeral and eternal. Right here, Right now, And an infinite promise of _more_ —

Now, the moonlight pours over them, soft, silver, discreet, casting their shadows in moving, indistinguishable shapes across the concrete ground, one profile blended into the other, indivisible. The profile of a lifted head emerges from the collision of shapes. One shadow goes down on the other. The air is still, the night is cold, their skin is hot.

Open on his back, Levi has an arm flung behind his head, blue veins flaring from the pale underbelly, his bicep bunched, thick and tight, into a knot. Halfway crunched up, strained forward, the nape of Levi's neck stretches, his eyes reaching for Eren, strenuously holding, preserving onto his thoughts, the image of Eren's mouth, his lips flushed and full, opened into a tender kiss—

Suddenly exhaling, Levi slackens, his body relaxing supine on the ground. His eyes roll. A weak, fainting sensation blackens his vision. The plates of his chest begin to swell and sink rapidly, the speed of his breath shortening in panting acceleration. Eren's hand spreads along Levi's muscled belly, heavy as a weight, pinning him down, forcing Levi to ride out a hot, rolling wave of desire, flat on his back, helpless. His belly strains against Eren's hand.

Open to the sky, the topography of Levi's face melts, giving onto the softness and the cryptic depths underneath the tough, superficial crust. He bares his teeth, his head rolling to the side, as he's swept away into a whirling bodily languor.

Spread open on the ground, exposed under the tapestry of night sky, he feels himself rising in a sudden rush, hurdling bodily in a long upward tunnel, slanting toward an opening of light. The darkness overhead is shredded with glittering points of rapturous stars. And like a held breath, the interval swells toward a crescendo in tandem with the accelerating slip of Eren's lips, as they slide again and again, over his flesh, the opening of light soaring closer—

Beneath the lowered sweep of his black lashes, Eren's eyes are blazing. His mouth is soft and warm and full of Levi. His cheeks are rounded and blown open, filled with Levi's flesh. In their pocket of solitude, there is only the wet-slip sound of Eren's lips as he holds the weight and warmth of Levi's blood, pulling him in deeper, deeper so that his throat heaves and opens wider, accommodating Levi's width and length, fluidly receiving the reflexive thrusts that Levi tries but fails to restrain as the light comes closer and closer. When Eren gives a low groan with Levi deep inside him, Levi feels the formidable power of the titan roar go over him in myriad waves. The sound of Eren makes him shake.

Deep inside Eren, Levi arches slowly backward, his eyeballs lifting into his skull. The arm curled behind his head flexes, and he reaches with his other hand into Eren's hair, holding him fast. The light is only a breath away now, the roaring sound of his own heartbeat thundering distantly beneath him. Levi opens his mouth, voiceless, arching back. Nocked like an arrow, he arches until the last second and, breaking finally into the light, he springs forward with an unknown energy possessing him, an unfamiliar feeling that has gone repressed, a resurgence of something very alive inside of him, finally conquering—and now unloading, flush after flush, in a hard shuddering release. At some time, without sight or awareness, an action automatic and inexorable, Eren's hand finds Levi's and holds on.

Never before has Levi trembled. But he trembles now. He trembles and dies and comes back to life. The stars and sky are spinning fast. He hears his own death and resurrection, blood and breath beating in his ears, Eren holding his hand until the very end and through the revival, then kissing Levi as he comes back to life, waiting patiently for the fluid in Levi's spine to coagulate again into its indomitable iron rod so that he can sit up by his own strength. Eren's perpetrating mouth is slack and flushed and glistening. His eyes hang unmoving among the spinning stars. His pupils have swallowed much of their color. They are both breathless.

—Is it meaningless, Captain? Do you know the answer?

—Let me show you the answer.

With a hand opened on Eren's chest, Levi introduces himself to all of Eren, taking in his hands the parts of Eren that are untouched and pure. Not even the tea-shop hag had touched him here—

Lying on his back, Eren watches Levi's face under the dark screen of his eyelashes, the pylons of his legs outflung, each bent at a right angle, akimbo. His arms lie flat, the pale vulnerable undersides upturned, his palms outward, as if he's been restrained. As if his body has retained the shape of shackles and metal. And Levi can see it again: He sees Eren chained there, a metal bit shoved between his teeth, his forehead split open by a blade, dark blood running over his face.

With all the tenderness he possesses, Levi wraps a hand around Eren's erection and presses the heat of him against his eyelids, against his cheek, feeling his warm, living pulses. He tastes Eren—briny and bitter—in his mouth. Then Eren sees something too: He sees Captain Levi's face, melancholic, beleaguered, hair blowing back from his forehead, as he had looked at Eren across the bright, collapsing grotto, _I'm sorry it always has to be you, Eren . . ._ , that's what he had said, in his low, solemn voice that somehow carried, without volume or force, through the chaos and rumble of the end.

But it hadn't been the end.

Not even close—

On his hands and knees, Levi then comes over Eren, his arms astride Eren's shoulders, the flare of his chest closing in from above. Eren's eyes are dark, bottomless, uncritical, watching Levi's face, pale and moonlike, against the black sky. Braced on his hands, Levi steadily holds Eren's gaze, his eyes shining out from under the front of his hair, bright, contemplative, inscrutable.

The iron armor and the shield have fallen away, crumbled, and so Levi is not unnerved when the sounds of the underground float up to him and he remembers, briefly, that he was formed inside a wound rather than a womb. His mother was a wound, and therefore, by nature, he is a weapon. But here—despite his nature, he has been stripped, unarmed, taken in by the pull of Eren's touch. Here—at the keen edge of something profound and finite, he is gentle and tender and soft. He is not a wound. No . . . But perhaps a scar. And like a scar, when he goes down on Eren, their stomachs meeting halfway between two and one, it seems as though he sinks into Eren's skin, indelibly. Their two bodies blend and they become the same. Or it could be that they have always been the same.

Overtaken by biology, the sense of urgency gripping him once again, Eren bares his fanglike teeth, raises his head, and drags at Levi's face, at his hair, drawing him closer. All his body and fiber strain toward Levi, his mouth gasping suffocatingly. He continues pulling Levi's face lower, lower, his own head going up, the wings of his shoulder blades furling off the ground. Eren's nose and then gasping mouth fill Levi's vision and then slide out of it as Eren pulls his face lower still, and then Levi is staring, unseeing, at the hollow of Eren's throat, feeling Eren's tongue, wide and flat and hot, passing the length of his forehead and moving down his cheek.

The night sky then whirls above Levi again, his head bent back now, with the heat of Eren's mouth on his neck. Levi feels teeth. He nearly keels over from the exquisite pain. He abandons himself to it. He abandons himself to Eren, his flesh surrendering to the palms of Eren's hands on his backside. Blood springs up beneath Eren's teeth, and Levi opens his mouth in a snarl, breathing hard, his voice spinning out of him with each furious collision of their bodies.

 _That's good, Eren,_ Levi says, holding the back of Eren's head, his eyes backrolled and blind, as Eren pulls in the taste of brass from his neck.

 _I wanted to know what you tasted like_ , Eren says. I _wanted to know before they do_

 _I'll make top-quality titan fodder, I'm sure_

 _Yeah . . ._ Eren's teeth cut into Levi's shoulder, and Levi exhales on a long, low hiss, the crescents of his blunt fingernails stripping down the musculature of Eren's back. Levi hears in Eren's chest—feels against his own chest—the deep rumbling rage of Eren's roar. _if I don't finish you first, Captain_

 _Aren't you a greedy bastard_

 _I—_ The column of Eren's throat stretches back. Moonlight glitters on his straight white teeth. His voice becomes increasingly tighter like that of a man in pain _—_ _I'm on fire, Captain. I'm burning_

Levi sinks a hand in Eren's hair and flexes over him _—_ _It's all right, We're all right_. Their noses touch and the tips of Levi's hair drag across Eren's forehead. His lips hover over Eren's as though to catch them in a kiss, but he doesn't possess the mental faculties to do anything but breathe and watch as the fire surges and floods Eren's bone marrow, rekindling something monstrous inside him.

 _I'm burning, I'm telling you—_

 _Shhh, It's all right . . ._

 _Captain—_

Eren's eyes blaze helplessly as a thin, warm steam begins to emerge from his pores _—_ _I'm telling you, listen to me, Captain_ _—_ Levi pushes the hair clear from Eren's hot and steaming face so that his glass-marble eyes shine out, fading in and out of focus. One moment keen on Levi's face, the next glazed and distant _—_ _Eren, I told you, it's all right —_ The thin steam rises and warms Levi's naked skin, touching him everywhere all at once _—_ _No no no, it's not all right, I can't—_ The color of Eren's eyes swirl and spin around the gaping wells of his pupils. His eyes strip Levi down powerless, and Levi feels himself rise out of his own body, careening into the sky among the stars.

 _You idiot . . ._ Far from above Levi can see himself straddling Eren, his own shoulder blades shaking. He watches himself as he shudders to pieces _—_ _Don't you get it?_

 _I'm burning too . . ._

Eren's eyes are watered and clouded with delirium. Levi kisses him very softly—and continues kissing him in spasmodic moments between breathing and careening, their foreheads slanted together, their skin slipping along their sweat. The thread of Eren's voice pulls tighter and with it his whole body follows like a puppet on strings. The thick ropes of his muscles coil, the ridges of his abdominals become sharp and distinct. His biceps squeeze into knotted swells and all his blood boils to the surface.

—Roar for me, Eren

— _Ohhh_

—That'll do

A cloud of steam surges up around them as Eren diminishes into liberated panting bonelessness, his muscled belly shivering now and again with debilitating bolts of electricity. Fever has washed his face and neck and chest in a dull scarlet. His eyes are shut as Levi's face comes down to take the breath from Eren's mouth.

Eren moans into Levi with a vibrating eloquence that echoes all throughout his hollow bones and what Eren is feeling, Levi can also feel and then he too can hear the heartbeat sound:

 _temporary temporary temporary_

The rose lays wilted and spoiled, emitting its dead sweet smell. Its fallen red petals splatter the ground.

As Eren clasps Levi tight to his heart, his shoulders steel into immovable domes as though he can permanently impress the outline of Levi's body onto his own. With nowhere else to go and nowhere else he'd want to go, Levi melts into the shelter of Eren's chest.

The world is shuttered behind Levi's eyelids: The sky. The ground. Everything except the sounds of Eren's breath and blood. They lie there together as Levi slowly and surely reclaims his body. In his wrist, his pulse strikes to a rekindled braggadocio: I live again.

Under his head, Eren's chest rises and falls and rises and falls.

 _Bury the dead._

 _Do not self-pity._

 _Unburden the heart._

 _And melt into me._

* * *

 **Extra**

The next morning, when Eren wakes up, he finds a black hat that looks vaguely familiar sitting on his bedside table. There's a brown crusty streak across the wide, flat brim. Eren picks at it with his fingernail, watching the streak come away in rusty flakes. He knows what it is. At breakfast, he tells the squad about the mysterious hat, not mentioning the blood stain, and asks if anybody knows to whom it belongs. Nobody claims it.

From the head of the table, Captain Levi says, "I'd throw it out. Who knows what kind of filth wore it."

Eren does as Levi suggests.

That evening Eren goes up to the rooftop and finds the dead rose stem, brittle and naked of its petals. He picks it up and looks it over. With his other hand, he flings the hat into the sky, watching it soar like a black felt saucer into the blood-red horizon.

The door opens onto the roof. Eren turns and sees Captain Levi emerge from the stairwell. Automatically Eren's skin begins to warm and soften, giving itself up to the memory of the captain's hands, his mouth, as they touched each part of his body and drew him into the somatic agony of passion. As he dissolves into remembering, an orgasmic luminousness repossesses his complexion and makes him glow. His clothes seem to fall away, gone with the hat, though when Eren looks down at himself, his day clothes still hang from his frame, limp, whole, and untouched.

Levi walks past Eren, seeming unaffected by their pocket of solitude, undistracted by memory. He stops and stands at the edge of the rooftop, looking past the district, past the walls, at something impossibly far away. In that instant, a wave of anxiety goes over Eren and he sees a daydream of his hands flinging out to catch Levi around the waist and jerk him back before he can leap over the side of the building. His heart palpitates with panic, but his hands remain at his sides, unmoved. The captain wouldn't jump. Eren knows that. Eren _knows_ that.

"How are you feeling?" Levi says.

"I'm a little tired still," Eren says. He keeps his hands at his sides, watching the captain stand at the edge of the roof, thinking that he knows the captain wouldn't jump, that he _knows_ the captain wouldn't jump.

"You should find your energy quickly," Levi says. "You'll need it soon."

"Yes sir."

Levi's dark hair catches the last vestiges of sunlight and lifts up from his temples as a brisk air winnows through it. The muscles in his arms and neck and back are comfortably relaxed, as if his spine has not yet fully steeled. The captain has remained, to this moment, accessible and soft. "I wanted to tell you." Levi doesn't look at Eren as he speaks, looking out and over the district, and he almost seems vulnerable, still a bit raw from last night. "That is, I wanted to say . . . thank you."

"For what?"

"Proving me wrong." Levi cups a hand over his neck. He's wearing his cravat today. Eren knows why. "You were a little rough there, however. You don't have much restraint, do you?"

"I'm sorry." Eren wanes a little. "I didn't mean to hurt you."

"You couldn't if you tried."

"Captain," Eren says. "There's something I wanted to tell you too." Levi turns to him and Eren looks him in the eye. "The teashop-keeper—"

"The teashop-keeper?" Levi says. The brusque interruption startles Eren and he hesitates. Levi's face is immobile and cool, eclipsed by the eye of the sinking sun behind him. He waits.

"Yes, the teashop-keeper," Eren says. "She told me that the only thing that lets us endure this hell is . . ." He loosens his fingers around the dead flower stem and holds it up as a token for the concept that he does not say. "She said it's the only thing with any meaning." Eren looks at Levi, who is looking back at him steadily. "But I think she was wrong. It would've been meaningless with her. I would've felt nothing." He makes a fist, the stem in hand, and puts it on his chest in a salute. "I think it had meaning only because it was with you, Captain."

He holds Levi's eyes for a long time, and in that moment they share the same delusion, going back in time, remembering and re-experiencing and reliving everything that happened between them. Eren's eyelids become heavy. Levi's flesh surrenders. And if Eren would say only a single syllable more, Captain Levi, Humanity's Strongest Soldier, would become a pathetic, trembling mess.

But without speaking another word, Eren turns and disappears down the stairwell. He shuts the door behind him.

Levi stares at the shut door. His eyes travel past it, following after Eren. He imagines himself tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day, leaving a fresh rose in Eren's bedroom, and Eren will know what it means, a secret message soluble by him alone, and during the dead of night Eren will come to the rooftop where they can blaze up in an impassioned catastrophe, dying in each other's arms and coming away reborn. Bringing each other back to life again, and again, and again. He imagines this—and turns into the twilight.

Fading embers of light coruscate in the color of Levi's eyes. Watching another day expire, the light withdrawing into the distance, he raises the iron armor and the shield and becomes invulnerable. Bloodless. His stillness and solitude will not be violated by anyone, let alone Eren Jaeger.

And yet . . .

He puts his hand on his neck and feels a haunting flame flicker within his skin.


End file.
